Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Bring on the potential miracles!

Tulane stares direct into the maw tonight- as top-ranked, undefeated Memphis rolls into New Orleans. Very tricky spot- the New York Post puts visiting Memphis -14 over Tulane.

Frankly, this Memphis game probably comes at the best possible time. Interest in New Orleans would be near dead otherwise.

Tulane has failed to turn its solid out of conference success into any sort of regular season conference campaign. Take out the utter dregs of the League: Rice, SMU and East Carolina- and it is hard to argue Tulane has done anything in League play.

The hopeful story of Tulane as an emerging, cognizant League power is over for this year. The League got a lot better than most expected. In the little I’ve seen, Tulane lacks a real primary or secondary ball handler. People have been zapping the guards- but who in the front court is a plus creator and distributor? And of course, any sort of athletic size perplexes them offensively. Forget 12-4; even 8-8 seems problematic now.

So, to honestly salvage the season, Tulane is left only with one-off opportunities to indicate progress: the signature win, the “get hot” at the right time tournament run, etc.

Frankly, the Green Wave needs as many chances at singular, amazing success as possible. So this Memphis game is helpful on that score as well. The season-long story looks a lot less promising as it did six weeks ago. Any sort of program-wide “good feeling”, based on the sustained campaign, is probably shot.